A Record of Action….A Promise of More!

• • We have through Objective One secured £10.2 million investment in supporting Cornish fishing, and £52.2 million in Cornish farming and food.
  • We have invested over £4 million in the County Farms since 2005 to enable affordable entry into farming.
  • We have established one of our County Farms as a ‘learning farm’ so that local children can learn about and understand farming and the valuable contribution it makes to our economy, and another County Farm provides work opportunities for people with learning disabilities.
  • We have started to use exception sites to ensure that there are more affordable homes for retiring agricultural tenants.
  • We have supported local farmers to set up farm shops where they can sell their produce at a price which will enable them to keep farming.
  • We have introduced farm based composting on two sites and five more have been identified.
  • Nationally, we have been fighting to ensure fair prices for farmers’ produce against the power of supermarkets.

  The Lib Dem Guarantee

  • We will invest in and manage the County Farms to maintain a viable, affordable farming option for new entrants in Cornwall, with no overall cut in acreage.
  • We will roll out local purchasing across all Cornwall Council services, sourcing food and other items locally by taking account of carbon footprint wherever possible. Royal Cornwall Hospitals Trust now spends 83% of its food budget locally.
  • We will support initiatives to protect Cornwall's fishing quota and to improve the quality of fish handling and marketing to enable the industry to achieve best market price and local added value.
  • We will support food from Cornwall, local farmers markets, farm shops and shops selling local produce.
  • We will work with Town and Parish Councils to increase provision of allotments across Cornwall

  Compare the difference!

  • Successive Governments have let down farmers. Hundreds of local families have been forced out of farming in Cornwall by successive crises made worse by Government mishandling, not least BSE under the Conservatives, and Foot and Mouth under Labour. Under Labour, the situation for farmers went from bad to worse when Labour utterly mishandled the foot and mouth crisis.
  • For every £1 consumers spend on food in supermarkets’, just 8 pence now goes to the farmer. No government has yet tackled the supermarket’s abuse of their market power – whose record profits have too often come at the expense of bankrupted farms.
  • The Conservatives agreed the Common Fisheries Policy, destroying much of our fishing fleet and signing away our fish.